Late last week I finally got my results from the VCAP DCV deploy exam which I sat mid-December.

I was of course extremely pleased to learn I had passed the exam.

In this post I will share some of my thoughts on the exam.

Exam guide / blueprint

There’s lots of preparation resources available and lots of guides already written so I won’t go in to specifics on the different exam objectives, but I’ll list the resources I’ve used.

First, one of the most important preparation steps is of course to read the Exam blueprint closely. This includes the exam objectives in detail, the prerequisites and a lot of resources.… continue reading

HPE recently announced that their HPE InfoSight service now supports servers. This is something we have been waiting for and we’re eager to check out the new functionality.

The server integration in InfoSight requires iLO Amplifier Pack to be installed and integrated with InfoSight.

In our environment we are using HPE OneView to manage our servers so the Amplifier Pack isn’t something we have tested as some of the functionality is overlapped in OneView. When the Amplifier pack came out I seem to recall that you couldn’t add in a server which was also managed by OneView. This makes sense since both products can make changes to the servers.… continue reading

As a follow-up of my exploration of the HPE PDU REST API I wanted to create a Powershell module as a wrapper for the API.

I’ve previously written a post on how to create a Powershell module as a wrapper for an API here. The PDU module will be built in the same way where there will be a private function that handles the actual API requests.

This time I also wanted to go a bit further and split out the functions into individual script files that the module root file will load. With individual files the maintenance of the functions as well as the split between private and public functions would be easier.… continue reading

In a previous post I described how we are setting up remote offices for a customer with two-node vSAN clusters. I meant to get this post out right after that previous one, but things happened… Anyways, here’s how we automated those two-node vSAN clusters.

Currently we have 7 of these racks ready with more to come. As these will be installed at distant locations we are extra keen on knowing that they are all configured as they should, and that the configuration is the same cross these multiple locations.

Of course, this calls for automation. And with our favorite automation tool PowerCLI we have put together a script to do the vSAN configuration for us.… continue reading

I had the pleasure of giving a talk about how to do monitoring of the vCenter Server during the VMUG Oslo meeting in December. The session was an extension of what I presented during the VMUG meetings in May and the vBrownbag session during VMworld Europe.

The demos showed how we can get health status and metrics from a vCenter Server Appliance utilizing the new REST APIs shipped in 6.5 and 6.7. During the session I built out a Grafana dashboard with version and uptime information about the vCenter, the health status, vCenter service status, disk utilization and CPU/Memory utilization.

Now we will add performance metrics and health status of the VCSA to our monitoring solution. We’ll utilize the REST APIs in vCenter and feed the data into our Influx database and visualize it in Grafana.

In vCenter we have the Appliance Management page also refered to as the VAMI. We will use this as a blueprint of what we want to visualize, but we’ll try to fit the important parts into a single Grafana dashboard.… continue reading

Through the API you are able to pull some details about the PDU as well as different utilization data. Based on your PDUs capabilities you should also be able to control different outlets. My focus has been to pull some details about the PDUs, and to pull the load on the different segments.

As I usually do when I set out exploring an API I was looking for the documentation. Surprisingly there was nothing to be found. The only thing I found was a few lines in the PDU User guide regarding authentication.… continue reading

This article will describe how you can disable the IPMI over LAN access on HPE iLO.

The IPMI protocol can present a security vulnerability where the authentication process for IPMI requires a server to send a hash of a user password to the client before authentication. This is not a new vulnerability and since this is a part of the specification of the protocol there is no fix for it besides disabling it or accepting it.

Note that iLO versions 2, 3 and 4 have the IPMI over LAN access enabled by default whereas iLO version 5 has disabled this by default.… continue reading

This is a short post on how to extend the internal firmware repository in HPE OneView.

The procedure is documented in the installation guide for 3.0, but if you are like me chances are that you don’t have that lying around so I thought I’d write up a short post on it for future reference.

The process is pretty straight forward:

Shut down the appliance

Extend the hard disk to 275GB*

Start the appliance

The repository should be extended, if not do a manual restart

Note that the disk needs to be minimum 275 GB for the repository to be extended, and that anything more than 275GB will be wasted space